Tag Archives: Capital Controversy

 Spaghetti economics: Shootout at Harvard Square There were two letters about the poorly written (not the English, always impeccable, contrasting to my spaghetti English, which is always slightly off, like the Westerns) piece that The Economist had on Donald Harris. One by Robert Blecker, Steve Fazzari and Peter Ho, setting the record straight on the breadth and depth of Harris' contributions to economics. On this, they echo what the Post said about Harris' policy advice in his native...

Pasinetti, Garegnani and the president of Italy in 2010Last week, in my senior seminar on the history of economic thought, I made the kids read a paper by Pasinetti on "Progress in Economic Science", which was published in a book edited by Boehm, Gehrke, Kurz and Sturn. It's a short defense of pluralism in economics on the basis of the co-existence of Kuhnian paradigms, with a relatively optimistic view of the possibility of progress, in a discipline in which, as he noted, the object of...

Friedman's adviseesZachary Carter, of Price of Peace fame (a good book that I recommend, btw), wrote an interesting piece on Milton Friedman's legacy, which I think is, as Hyman Minsky said of Joan Robinson's work, wrong in incisive ways. But even before we get to his main point, that the era of Friedmanomics is gone, it is worth thinking a bit about the way he approaches the history of ideas. This is clearly a moral tale for Carter, with good guys and bad guys. Gunfight at high noon. It is...

This is definitely not my topic of research. So you may very well ask why would I venture to wrote about it, beyond the obvious reason that it is probably one of the most debated issues these days in the US, with the government shutdown being related to the now infamous wall. I am myself twice an immigrant, I descend from immigrants (my parents returned to their country of origin, but had emigrated, and on my mother side my grandfather was also an immigrant, and the same goes on my father's...

I promised to discuss Nick Rowe's claim that one must start with Aggregate Demand and Supply (AS/AD) to explain macroeconomics. Nick's argument is that the AS/AD model is useful to analyze monetary economies, and he quite correctly points out that money must be part of the discussion from the start. In his words: And if you don't start with money, monetary exchange, and AD and AS, you are doing macro wrong. Because the only thing that makes macro different from micro general equilibrium...

The natural rate is an old concept, well explained in Wicksell, that almost vanished (Keynes was explicitly against it, even though he partially failed to get rid of it), and has made a come back with the Neo-Wicksellian model that dominates macro today (misnamed New Keynesianism). Below the estimates published in the speech by John Williams. Note that what seems to drive the natural rate of interest is the basic rate determined by the central bank. Either the fall of the natural rate...

Ariel Dvoskin and Fabio Petri just got their paper published in Metroeconomica. From the abstract: Among the recent interventions in the capital controversy, the debate between Paola Potestio and Kurz & Salvadori has raised important issues. We agree with Potestio's rejection of the legitimacy of a value endowment of capital but we disagree with her dismissal of the relevance of reswitching and reverse capital deepening: these phenomena are very important because they undermine the...